The Alignment of Form and Function: Corpus-Based Evidence

International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12.511-534, 2007

This paper analyses constraints on inflectional syncretism and inflectional allomorphy using frequency information. Syncretism arises where one form is associated with more than one function, whereas inflectional allomorphy occurs where there is more than one inflectional class, and a single function is associated with two or more forms. If high frequency is associated with more differentiation on both sides, we expect, on the one hand, that a frequent function will have a high number of forms and, on the other, that a frequent form will have a high number of functions. Our study focuses on Russian nominals, in particular nouns, which exhibit both syncretism and inflectional allomorphy. We find that there is a relationship between frequency and differentiation, but that it is not exceptionless, and that the exceptions can be understood in terms of the use of referrals as default rules.

Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Linguistically Interpreted Corpora (LINC-04), 2004

This paper describes a novel undertaking: comparing the relationship between grammatical ambiguity (syncretism) in nouns, as represented in a default inheritance hierarchy, with textual frequency distributions. In order to do this we consider a language with a reasonable number of grammatical distinctions and where syncretism occurs in different morphological classes. We investigated this relationship for Russian nouns. Our results suggest that there is an intricate relationship between textual frequency and inflectional syncretism.

1998

Journal of Linguistics, 1993

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013

A new kind of frequency dictionary is a valuable reference for researchers and students of Russian. It shows the grammatical profiles of nouns, adjectives, and verbs, namely the distribution of grammatical forms in the inflectional paradigm. The dictionary is based on data from the Russian National Corpus (RNC) and covers a core vocabulary (5,000 most frequently used lexemes). Russian is a morphologically rich language: its noun paradigms harbor two dozen case and number forms, while verb paradigms include up to 160 grammatical forms. The dictionary departs from traditional frequency lexicography in several ways: 1) word forms are arranged in paradigms, so their frequencies can be compared and ranked; 2) the dictionary is focused on the grammatical profiles of individual lexemes, rather than on the overall distribution of grammatical features (e.g., the fact that Future forms are used less frequently than Past forms); 3) the grammatical profiles of lexical units can be compared against the mean scores of their lexicosemantic class; 4) in each part of speech or semantic class, lexemes with certain biases in the grammatical profile can be easily detected (e.g. verbs used mostly in the Imperative, Past neutral, or nouns often used in the plural); and, 5) the distribution of homonymous word forms and grammatical variants can be followed over time and within certain genres and registers. The dictionary will be a source for research in the field of Russian grammar, paradigm structure, form acquisition, grammatical semantics, as well as variation of grammatical forms. The main challenge for this initiative is the intra-paradigm and inter-paradigm homonymy of word forms in the corpus data. Manual disambiguation is accurate but covers approximately five million words in the RNC, so the data may be sparse and possibly unreliable. Automatic disambiguation yields slightly worse results. However, a larger corpus shows more reliable data for rare word forms. A user can switch between a ‛basicʼ version, which is based on a smaller collection of manually disambiguated texts, and an ‛expandedʼ version, which is based on the main corpus, a newspaper corpus, a corpus of poetry, and the spoken corpus (320 million words in total). The article addresses some general issues, such as establishing the common basis of comparison, a level of granularity for the grammatical profile, and units of measurement. We suggest certain solutions related to the selection of data, corpus data processing, and maintaining the online version of the frequency dictionary.

The complexities of morphology, edited by Peter Arkadiev and Francesco Gardani

The complexity of an inflection class system is the average extent to which elements in the system inhibit motivated inferences about the realization of lexemes' paradigm cells. Research shows that systems tend to exhibit relatively low complexity in this sense. However, representations of inflectional systems tend to include only affixal and regular patterns, leaving questions about how irregular patterns and non-affixal 'layers' of inflectional exponence affect the complexity of a system. We address these questions by exploring four layers of inflectional exponence of Russian nouns, including irregular patterns within each layer. Our data show that the Russian noun system exhibits relatively low complexity even when irregular and non-affixal exponence are included in it. The implicative structure of the system and the uneven distribution of lexemes across classes mitigate the uncertainty associated with irregular and non-affixal exponence. We also find that irregularity in some layers of exponence increases the complexity of the system, but in others it does not. This finding is consistent with the conclusion that the complexity of the whole system is not merely the sum of the complexity of its parts. Low systemic complexity in inflectional systems is, thus, an emergent property that may extend to inflectional patterns regardless of whether they are affixal and/or regular.

Journal of Linguistics 29.113–42, 1993

Lingvisticae Investigationes, 1984

Leo Elnitsky et Igor A. Mel'cuk: Description lexicographique de la cooccurrence de lexemes parametriques en francais et en russe: actant de valeur numerique vs. attribut de degree. On introduit d'abord deux traits importants du Dictionnaire explicatif et combinatoire (D.E.C.): 1) exigence de formali-sation rigoureuse et 2) description de toute la cooccurrence restreinte du lexeme vedette en termes de schema de regime (combinatoire syntaxique) et de fonctions lexicales (combinatoire lexicale). Le semantisme et la syntaxe de lexemes parametriques (du type VITESSE, POIDS, COUTER, MESURER) tels que presentes dans le D.E.C. sont decrits afin de formuler le probleme central: la description des expressions du type (couter) les yeux de la tete, dont la particularity est qu'elles expriment, tout en figurant comme actants syntaxiques, la valeur de la fonction lexical Magn. La solution pro-posee prevoit l'emploi d'une fonction lexicale composee MagnS2 et la post-ulation d&#...

1996

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This paper argues for the implementation of phase theory in morphology. On the basis of evidence from two types of structure, i.e. nominal root compounds and incorporated nominal gerunds (INGs), it is shown that phase theory interacts with linearization and antisymmetry in a principled way; thus allowing for a uniform account of syntactic word-formation processes below the word-level and well-known and thoroughly discussed syntactic operations in phrasal syntax. Hence, the position taken in this paper follows the trend set in the pioneering work of 4 While the form in (3a) is non-compositional, the forms in (3b) -(3d) -other than the lexicalized and possibly preferred interpretationall allow for a compositional interpretation in (3b) --(3d). In other words, the forms in (3b) -(3d) show the properties of their English counterparts and the form in (3a) is most likely the result of a lexical process of word formation. 5 Additionally, Keyser & Roeper (1992) argue that the ACP can be filled with more than one element of the same category type, as has been illustrated above for the nominal root compounds already, but it is not possible to insert several elements of different category types into that position: